


silence hurts more than the unknown (especially when it's yours)

by doctorsong



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet Collection, semi-related
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-27 01:59:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17757629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorsong/pseuds/doctorsong
Summary: Boy meets girl. Girl dies. Boy meets girl again. Girl kills boy. Boy meets newborn girl. Girl is kidnapped. Boy meets child girl. Boy finds out who girl is. Boy and girl get engaged. Girl dies and comes back to life. Girl kills boy again, and brings him back to life. Boy and girl get married. Girl fakes killing boy. Boy meets ghost girl. Boy and girl spend twenty-four years in domestic bliss...And then what?Or, the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey relationship between two time-traveling Doctors, and the parents of the bride.





	1. the universe will sing you to your sleep

 

 

 

 

> “Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love.”  
>  – Sarah Jane Smith, “School Reunion” (2006)

* * *

 

“Doctor, you need to sleep.”

River and the Doctor are sitting on top of the covers of his bed, fully dressed, shoulder to shoulder and legs entwined. It’s only been a few weeks since Manhattan in both their timelines and, after spending a bit of time apart, she had come back and hadn’t moved from his side ever since. To be fair, the TARDIS hadn’t moved at all either. The poor old thing had managed to leave New York perfectly fine, able to drop River off and take the Doctor somewhere he didn’t want to tell her about.

But after arriving in London in the 19th century, once River had come back running after Vastra’s worrying call, the TARDIS had refused to move anywhere else. It was like she sensed their mood, River had thought that first day, running her hands soothingly across the console. Like she was grieving as well.

“I don’t even know what a peaceful night of sleep is anymore.” Empty. Broken. Lost.

“Oh, I can help you with that, sweetie,” River says, her voice dripping with innuendo, but her eyes devoid of any real intention.

He knows that, knows that she’s just trying to bring a little normalcy to all of it the only way she knows. To bring him back. But he’s not in the mood for River being… _River,_ and the lack of a proper answer tells her everything she needs to know.

“I mean it, Doctor. You can’t keep going on like this.” And oh, she’s _so_ much like her parents, he doesn’t know how is he even supposed to deal with it all. “You’re even clumsier than usual, and it’s going to end up messing something important up. Trust me when I say that, however shitty you are feeling right now, neither of us want that happening.”

She grabs his hand in both of hers and brings it up her lips to kiss the palm. The small gesture is enough to break his composure a little, caressing her cheek with the tips of his fingers before she sets their joined hands back on her lap. She won’t let it go for a second, won’t let him alone long enough for him to run away. _Again._

“I know you accidentally ended up really early in my timeline, right after Berlin. Scared me half to death, the look in your eyes. We’d just gotten engaged,” she quips, and that manages to make him smile for a fraction of a second – small victories, “and the future you arrives looking for the future me, the one you...” She stops herself and prays he didn’t notice. It isn’t the right time. She isn't sure it will ever be. “You walked in that room like a wounded wild animal, Doctor. You needed me, I know that now, but not the _me_ that was there. You were desperate and more reckless than I've seen you be so far. If I hadn’t stopped to tell you exactly when I was, to show you the still-empty diary…”

“I would have told you I had just let your parents die,” he finishes for her, something dark growing again in the depth of his eyes. River’s hand twitches with the need to slap him, to talk some sense into him. She wishes she could yell at her husband until he realizes it wasn’t his fault, that there was nothing else he could’ve done. That they didn’t die when their timelines stopped crossing… That they managed to live a long, happy life together.

But she can’t. This Doctor is nothing like anyone she’d seen before now. It’s not difficult to know why: past River had only started seeing future Doctor again when he was healed. That’s both a relief and immensely worrying for her, if she’s honest. She knows that he’ll get over this dark phase he’s going through, she’s seen his future self, but she has no idea how, or how long will it take, and not knowing how to help him is killing her.

“It’s not just about that,” she chooses to say in the end, closing her eyes and hoping he follows her cue. “I can’t help you if you’re not consistent with which me you end up getting.”

“I’m not asking for your help.”

And oh, she can feel her hearts breaking little by little at the venom in his voice. River knows he doesn’t mean to hurt her, but it’s getting harder and harder to reconcile the playful and loving Doctor with… This. It’s not the first time they’ve fought, of course. She’s killed him a couple times already, and they inevitably have their fair share of arguments every time they meet, both pre- and post-wedding. But none of it compares to what they're going through now.

“You shouldn’t have to ask.”

Even if he doesn’t answer, his silence once more says it all. Hands still entwined together, he lowers his head to River’s chest and, after a couple of minutes, finally falls asleep.

 

 


	2. the story never ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A night in Darillium, two years in. River Song needs sun, and the Doctor spoilers.

> “It's a long story, and I don't know most of it.”  
> – The Doctor, “Time of Angels” (2010)

* * *

Domestic bliss certainly had a new meaning when it came to River Song and the Doctor. Darillium wasn’t retirement for either of them, even if they were doing an effort to try and lay low. No more running around, no more traveling to the far side of the universe and back. If you asked them, they’d say it was a difficult compromise to reach, but the twinkle in both their eyes would tell you everything you’d need to know. It hadn’t been complicated, or a struggle, or something they would have to spend twenty-four years getting used to.

It just didn’t matter, not at all.

However, that didn’t mean that they were staying idle, sleeping in, gardening or drinking themselves to death, whatever it is that people do when they have nothing else to entertain themselves with.

“Oh, come on!”

The night was long and dark, but the lack of sun didn’t mean the brightness of three moons in the sky made the place anything less than beautiful. And yet, two human years in, River was getting desperate for something different. She had seen everything and done even more but now, sitting in bed in the middle of an endless night, she was well and truly bored.

“No, and that’s final,” was the Doctor’s answer, and his tone was a dead giveaway of just how many times they had had that same discussion in the past.

“But my skin, Doctor!” River turned around to get on her knees and lifted her skirt up to her thighs, prompting him to roll his eyes. Never one to miss a chance to show off her legs – and make her husband blush. Not that he was a blusher, this time around. “I’m getting paler and paler by the minute.” And oh, what a blatant lie, what a flimsy excuse. “If we don’t go anywhere with a proper sun soon, next time we see each other you’ll have me confused with a ghost!”

Silence fell in their room. It hadn’t been a spoken agreement of any sort, not discussing Darillium being their “last night”. The Doctor had heard the same stories River had, and he had the advantage – if one could put it that way – of having heard that first hand, from his wife herself, the day of her death. The day he saved her ghost inside the biggest database in the universe.

And yet, centuries later, he couldn’t stop thinking there must be a loophole he was missing, somehow. Yes, twenty-four years with the wife he had always met out of order was more than a dream, but he had had to see her die when he had no idea who she was, what was she going to become, all the ways she’d turn his life around… How much he’d love her for doing so. He owed her as much, but it was clear that there was no way of changing the past – or the future, for that matter. Last time they had tried doing so, it had ended in reality almost being destructed, and him disappearing from existence for a while.

He'd do it again, willingly, if he knew it would work.

“What the Hell,” he sighed, and River knew she had won. Her smile was brighter than usual when he patted her naked knee and stood up from his side of the bed. “Get ready, dear. I know just the perfect place.”

And if while River was changing into a slightly more decent outfit, the Doctor was checking the first page on his diary and holding back tears, he’d never say.

There was no need for them to keep registering everything they were doing anymore, considering they spent most of their time joined at the hip – or other places. But the Doctor wasn’t ready to let go that easily, to risk forgetting even a single second of his time with River. He wouldn’t get it again, he’d never have such a chance. “What a sentimental idiot,” she used to tell him every time, and the Doctor would smile and continue writing.

But the first page, the very first encounter with this amazing woman that had dropped into his life turning it upside down with a single word, was something that he barely dared to re-read.

Everyone knew the Doctor didn’t like endings, he’d rip out the last page of his own diary if it were already written. But what do you do when the very first page has the very last breath? When the first moments are also the lasts? When the very-much-alive wife that’s half-naked in front of you is inevitably written inside a computer, and nothing you can do could ever change that? He loves River too much to dare rewrite a single word, a single moment. And yet, he cannot let go of the words themselves, from her first “Hello, sweetie” to the last “spoilers” that would shape their future – and past – relationship from then on. Or back.

The joys and struggles of marrying a time-traveler while being one.

“Should I pack a bikini?” River asks, bringing him out of his reverie. “I’m not sure the old girl still has some in the closet: it’s been so long since we’ve properly taken a vacation, she surely needed that storage space by now.”

The Doctor nodded absentmindedly, having no idea what would they even _do._ Knowing River, they would try to relax on a beach and suddenly find themselves excavating a mummy in 40th century Earth. Either way, it would make her happy, and he didn’t have the hearts to say no to anything she’d ask. Twenty-two years left, the rest of her life. No time to lose.

“I’ll start thinking you’re fonder of that diary than of your own wife, sweetie,” she jokes, eyeing him while tying her boots, almost ready to leave. “Maybe I should just steal it and run away with it.”

“Huh,” he says, turning around to properly face her while sneaking the little book inside his bedside table drawer, “you never know… Spoilers.”

“I’ve seen the look in your face when you’re reading, sometimes,” she starts, but it’s clear she just doesn’t know where she’s going with it. And it’s not every day you see River Song doubting herself or her own words. “You do know how it is going to end, don’t you, Doctor?” There is something similar to worry in her eyes, but she turns around and walks towards the bathroom the minute she notices him watching.

“What’s an end, if not a beginning?”

“The first time I met you, Doctor...” River tries to say, still inside the bathroom, and he smiles a little now that she cannot see him.

“We’ve met for the first time a couple of times, you’ll have to be more specific.” A beat. “Berlin?”

“I was thinking Florida.” Walking out of the bathroom, trying to tame her curls long enough to put them in a ponytail the best she can, that’s as domestic as he never dreamed they could get.

“Do you really remember that?”

They have never talked much about it, or at least they’ve never sat down to have that conversation the proper way. He knows the long exposure to the Silence during her childhood – the one in Florida, at least – made her memories about those years a blur. The Doctor hopes she doesn’t remember the worst of it: the loneliness, the dark and humid orphanage, the suit that would eat her every night, begging for help but nobody running to rescue her… And yet, he’s never really asked before now.

“When they spend your whole childhood conditioning you to kill a man, from the very first moment you are able to form conscious thought, if not before that… You will recognize him and never forget, not for one moment.”

Not a fairy-tale, as much as he wishes it could be. Not Amelia Pond and the Raggedy Man, not the Pandorica and the Last Centurion.

“It’s all blurred around the edges,” she admits, avoiding his eyes, “but you were there. And so were my parents.”

He will not ask, he cannot ask…

“I thought they were there to rescue me, that you would help me as well. If they were with you,” she smiles fondly, so out of place compare with the way she felt back then, “you couldn’t be that bad, could you?”

Can’t ask, can’t ask…

“And then, my mother shot me.”

Heartbreak and grief, the need to run towards that little kid and hug her, all over again. The all-consuming desire to rescue little Melody and take her to the safety of her Leadworth home, where she would be happy and loved and taken care of by two magnificent parents.

“Don’t even go there, Doctor.” Her tone is firm and, once more, she’s absolutely right about what he’s thinking: it’s clear by the look on his face, an open window inside his mind even without telepathy. She catches the Doctor watching her with that same expression more often than not, especially when mentioning either her parents, or who she was before River Song, before Berlin and the first time she murdered him before jumping out of a building. Before diaries, and time-travel, and chasing each other across every galaxy and every timezone in existence – even outside of reality itself.

“Have you ever thought about changing things, River?” So much for not asking. “Not now, maybe not this. But at some point in your life, you must have...”

The Doctor thinks she’s going to either slap him or ignore the question, rushing him out of the door towards the TARDIS. Instead, River smiles.

“Sometimes I did,” she admits, and something tells him this is the first time she’s saying it to someone else. Years spent convincing her parents of the opposite so they’d be a little happier about it, and here it was, truth in the end. “Not now,” she clarifies even if it’s not needed, even if they both know, “but when I was younger, after finding Mum and Dad, after learning this whole other side of the person I was supposed to kill... Yes, I did think of rebelling against whatever destiny had prepared.”

So much suffering that could’ve been avoided in such a simple way.

“I used to think if he, you, were such a good person like Amy said, then you’d go back in time and rescue me from Kovarian, from the orphanage, from the cold New York streets. While Amy went on and on about how her Raggedy Doctor would come back and take her far away from home, I was just wishing he’d rescue me and _just take me home._ I didn’t need new planets or watching the birth of stars, back then. I just wanted a proper Mum and Dad.”

A tear, a single tear. In all the time he’s known River, whatever the age and whatever the timeline, the Doctor could count with one hand the number of times he’d seen her properly cry. And he’s sure she’s never been this open to him either. Not about her past, her feelings, the pain she went through and never allowed anyone else to see.

“I still could,” he starts, and River laughs because she _knows._ “I could pop right back to that orphanage and take you home. I could even tell Rory and Amy where to find you – they must have been what? In their 50s, 60s?”

At that, River laughs even harder.

“I never told you, did I?” she asks, and it’s clear by the look on his face that he had never guessed, either. The change of topic takes him by surprise, but he's riveted by her words, her sweet voice, and a smile that shines brighter than before. “Oh, Daddy dear never told you either! All these years, and I still manage to surprise you, Doctor!”

She’s enjoying this, and the Doctor humors her because even if her eyes are still red and teary, he’d never deny her having a little fun – even if it’s at his expense. And, in all honesty, he’s genuinely curious about this.

“I’m sure I know but haven’t admitted it yet,” he says even though it’s such a blatant lie, because he can and because he knows it will make her smile. When did this new incarnation start acting like a boy with a crush?

“Oh, you wish!” A beat. “You know what? Let’s go get some sun. Story-time can wait.”

He doesn’t agree, because he can see the look in her eye. She’s doubting herself, something so unlike the River Song he knows, it’s hard to see and even harder to react to. So he smiles, raising a single eyebrow, and with a fond roll of his eyes starts walking towards the door.

It’s a relief for River, him knowing her so well she doesn’t have to put anything into words. This wonderful idiot, understanding more of her own feelings than she had ever done herself. It doesn’t matter the minute they step inside the TARDIS, though. The Old Girl has missed them, and no, they’re not going to make her wait this time. Whatever it was, they have twenty more years to talk in detail about.


	3. the universe doesn't agree

 

> “Every time you see them happy, you remember how sad they are going to be.”  
> – The Doctor, “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe” (2011)

* * *

“I’m not going to your wedding, and that’s my last word on the matter.”

Mels could be really stubborn when she wanted to be. It was something that Amy had always wondered about: how the hell had they managed to stay friends for so long when they were both exactly the same in that regard. In all honesty, even if they would never say it out loud, Rory really deserved a prize for having to put up with them for years.

“I already have your dress, Mels!” Amy was now pacing the room, bed and chairs full of folders and papers detailing every last bit of the wedding that was still being planned. And she was _cross._

“You should’ve asked me if I would be going _before_ you bought a dress for me and assumed I’d want to be your bridesmaid,” was Mels’ response, not even bothering to look up from where she was breaking apart one of the test bouquets Amy was trying to decide on. For some reason, the calmness with which she was dealing with the issue was riling the redhead up even more.

“You’re my best friend!” Amy’s voice got louder by the second and Rory winced. That was something their neighbours would have to get used to, and fast. “I shouldn’t have to ask you because you should be going!”

Sighing and flopping down on the bed – probably landing on top of the alcohol budget or something equally boring – she added, “Planning on spending that night in jail without anyone to bail you out is a fucking awful excuse, by the way.”

Rory, bless him, was trying to purposely ignore the discussion they had been having for a whole month already. It was always the same, every time they met up for lunch, or coffee, or when they rescued Mels from whatever trouble she was in at the time. They’d try catch up on their lives as if they hadn’t seen each other less than twenty-four hours ago, because that had always been their routine and no one wanted to break it. Given the fact that Amy’s days lately consisted in snogging people for money and planning her wedding, the bridesmaids topic wasn’t really something either of them could avoid.

He eyed the clock: they had been at it for over an hour. If their past arguments were anything to go by, one of them would break soon and they’d start talking about other things he really, _really_ wished he didn’t have to listen. And yet anything was better than this stupid discussion they seemed to love having. All of them were perfectly aware she’d never go even if her life depended on it, and yet...

“I don’t do weddings.” After a few minutes, Mels was the first one to break the silence with what she considered a perfectly reasonable explanation. And even if the words were always the same, even after hours discussing the same topic, Amy always accepted it. “I swear if I ever have to get married,” she added as an afterthought, disgust visible in her face, “it better be the end of the world.”

The three of them laughed at that, the universe and time itself alongside them. Oh, just you wait, Mels, just you wait.

**Author's Note:**

> English is clearly not my native language, so if you spot any major mistake please let me know! I don't have a beta for this fandom, so I'm sure there will be quite a few.


End file.
